James Warren
| Image = | RealName = James Warren Taubman | Pseudonyms = | Employers = | Titles = | Gender = | DateOfBirth = July 29, 1930 | YearOfBirth = 1930 | MonthOfBirth = July | DayOfBirth = 29 | DateOfDeath = | YearOfDeath = | MonthOfDeath = | DayOfDeath = | CityOfBirth = | StateOfBirth = | CountryOfBirth = | Spouse = | Creations = | First = | PersonalHistory = James Warren, born James Warren Taubman (July 29, 1930), is a magazine publisher and founder of Warren Publishing. Magazines published by Warren include Famous Monsters of Filmland and the horror-comics magazines Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. | ProfessionalHistory = Art and architecture James Warren was born at Mount Sinai Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An art student during his grammar school and high school years, he came in second one year in the Pennsylvania State Scholastic Art Competition. He attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture and served in ROTC, leaving his junior year to enlist in the United States Army when the Korean war began. Accepted into Armored Infantry Officers Training, he was deafened six months later during training when he got too close to the .50 caliber heavy machine gun. He was medically discharged a few months later, and did not return to Penn State. ''After Hours'' and Famous Monsters of Filmland In the 1950s, Warren worked in advertising as an artist and writer. Inspired by Hugh Hefner's magazine ''Playboy, he launched his own men's magazine, After Hours, which lasted four issues and led to his arrest on charges of obscenity and pornography in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was based. He recalled in an interview published in 1999: }} Through After Hours, Warren met his future collaborator, Hollywood literary agent Forrest J Ackerman, who submitted the pictorial feature "Girls from Science-Fiction Movies." Following correspondence and telephone calls, they met in person in New York City in late 1957. There, Ackerman showed Warren a horror movie-themed issue of the French magazine Cinema 57. Recalling his youth seeing black-and-white horror movies in theaters, and realizing many of those movies were playing on television to a new generation of children, he was inspired to launch an accompanying magazine "carefully crafted to spoof the monsters and yet treat them as 'heroes' ... The adults wouldn't buy it, but the kids — those millions of Baby Boomers — would. A few weeks later I was in Forrey Ackerman's living room in California, choosing the photos and article content for a one-shot magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland that went on sale that January with a February 1958 cover date. Warren said it sold out its 200,000 print run within days. He financed the first issue, for which the upstate New York printer wanted payment upfront, through "some advance money from my distributor," Kable News, A second issue was published eight months later "because I had to wait until the money came in from the first issue and Kable wouldn't advance it to me," Warren said. Warren moved to New York City in 1960s, though leaving the Captain Company, the mail-order firm he concurrently founded to sell horror-related items in Famous Monsters of Filmland, in Philadelphia, where overhead was cheaper. He found a duplex penthouse in midtown Manhattan where he lived on the top floor, using the ground floor living room, dining room, bath and kitchen was Warren Publishing's editorial office. By this time he was publishing, in addition to Famous Monsters, the magazines Wildest Westerns, Spacemen, and the satirical Help! During that magazine's five years of publications, the editorial assistants were future feminist icon Gloria Steinem followed by future Monty Python's Flying Circus cartoonist Terry Gilliam. ''Creepy'' In the mid-1960s, inspired by the EC Comics of the 1950s, Warren launched the black-and-white horror-comics magazines Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. He continued to publish a variety of magazines until the 1980s, when he left the field due to health problems. In 2008, he established a new venture, Jim Warren Publishing. | Notes = * | Trivia = | OfficialWebsite = | Links = References Further reading Horror Biz Magazine #4, 1999 Category:1930 births Category:American publishers (people) Category:Comic book publishers (people) Category:Living people }} Category:July 29, 1930